I don't know if it's relevant to the discussion, but at various times people have asked about pushing the current global module/package namespace into a package, so instead of
import sys
you might use
import std.sys
or
from std import sys
to reference the sys module as delivered with Python.
It might be worthwhile to consider that as an alternative or addition to this capability. Because of all the code changes it would cause, it's not likely to be considered before Python 3, but it seems to me that it might solve many common module collision problems without resorting to major changes to the semantics of the import statement.
I strongly suggest to keep this out of Aahz' PEP; it's just going to confuse the issue in the short run, and in the long run it's pretty independent. I also don't think that it's ever going to be that way. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)